The data analytics space continues to enjoy a healthy investment environment. Most recently, CloudPhysics, a data center management-focused startup in the analytics space, picked up a $15 million Series C funding round. The firm uses analytics for predictive virtual data center management.

Virtualized environments are becoming larger, denser and more complex than ever before. More integrations with other systems in the IT stack now exist, involving subtle inter-dependencies. Managing these environments has become very complex, and applying Big Data analytics to this problem is a novel approach being promoted by a number of startups and big companies, including Google.

CloudPhysics said the money will go toward improving its Software-as-a-Service solution, which leverages Big Data to uncover hidden operational hazards before problems emerge and to identify efficiency improvements in virtualized IT operations management.The company says it helps customers run virtualized data centers like Google runs its facilities.

The round was led by venture capital firm Jafco Ventures with participation from the company’s existing investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Mayfield Fund. CloudPhysics has raised $27.5 million to date, including its previous $10 million round.

“This is a very exciting time for CloudPhysics as it brings to market a fundamentally new approach to IT operations management,” said Jeb Miller, general partner at Jafco Ventures and CloudPhysics board member. “Through Big Data analytics, CloudPhysics is shifting the focus of infrastructure management from reactive to predictive, enabling more intelligent and cost-effective IT.”

Founded in 2011, CloudPhysics backers include VMware co-founder Diane Greene. The company has attracted customers across a large swath, including privately held investment firm Thiel Capital, Australian IaaS provider ZettaGrid and global healthcare company Sanofi.

New release tackles storage

Along with the funding, the company announced Storage Analytics with Smart Alerts, an updated offering aimed at preempting storage problems. Smart Alerts is a new feature that shifts the focus of alerting from reactive to predictive.

Storage is considered a major painpoint in the virtual data center. CloudPhysics uses a global dataset to examine metadata and trends from thousands of data centers and bakes these learnings into the analytics solution.

The technology evaluates all objects in the virtual data center against certain criteria (latency, duration, outstanding IOs, IOPS, etc.) and triggers Smart Alerts based on thresholds derived dynamically from patterns and trends observed across their global dataset. The performance and capacity analytics run across the entire virtual infrastructure.

Storage is a common painpoint

“Storage continues to be an extremely painful resource to manage in virtual environments, and the tools available today fail to provide the visibility, much less the intelligence, to help IT fully understand and easily control its most expensive data center resource,” said John Blumenthal, co-founder and CEO of CloudPhysics. “With our new release, we’ve doubled down on storage, providing storage-focused analytics that cut through the layers of complexity and provide answers IT teams need to prevent storage-induced downtime, optimize capacity and keep their virtual data centers healthy and operating with Google-like operational efficiency.”

It allows customers to immediately diagnose storage performance culprits, reducing the amount of time it takes to find in fix problems, according to the company. It also helps eliminate storage-related downtime which accounts for 58 percent of all downtime, CloudPhysics claims.

Bernd Harzog, Analyst at The Virtualization Practice notes the storage problem: “IT Ops teams managing virtualized infrastructures face a continuous onslaught of allegations that something is slow and that it is their fault. It turns out in more than 90 percent of the cases where the infrastructure actually is at fault, the culprit is storage.”